It took me a while to try out Google Talk, but as soon as I did I was instantly hooked. All you need is a microphone and you can talk to anyone you like for free and anywhere in the entire world. This technology has already been developed by companies like Skype and Vonage, but Google puts in a few different features. You can send files directly through Google Talk to the person that you are chatting with. Google Talk also allows you to setup a profile with a pic and you can even leave voice messages to someones e-mail! This service is also integrated with G-mail so you can be notified when a new message is sent to your G-mail account. If you don't feel like talking you can also instant message just as easily.

Yes, like most things Google it is completely free so you have nothing to lose. You can find out more about Google Talk here.

Google's Zeitgeist has complied a list of the top search terms for 2006 and are available now. Zetgeist shows the top searches on Google.com of 2006 and the top news searches of 2006. I was very surprised to find out that the top search is bebo a video service.

That's not all though they have categories like "what's hot", "Current Events", "Milestones", "Entertainment" and "Sports". This can be a good way to judge what people are searching for on the net. On the Zeitgeist Home Page you can also even find out what people are searching for in certain countries. This can be very useful to judge trends and hot spots on the net. So check it out and let us know what you think.

Google Base was released over a year ago now, but it just now beginning to gain traction. It was designed as a place were Google users can post anything including images, products, services, real estate, recipes, vehicles and pretty much anything else you can think of. Google Base gives you the option to upload one item at a time or you can even do a bulk upload if you have your information in the right format. The beauty of Google Base is that it is free to list your items unlike other places including the mighty Ebay.

Google has recently updated Base to include the ability to upload pictures of your item as well which are displayed in a slideshow format when a user clicks on your item. Google has also integrated Google Checkout and Froogle into Base so a buyer can purchase an item directly from Google Base simply by clicking the Buy button. As a merchant you can check your orders and view all of your items without having to go to the Google Checkout site. They also track how many impressions, clicks and page views your items receive. You can check out an example of an item here or you can go directly to the home page here and start posting your items.

"We hope that someday this institution will eclipse Google itself in overall world impact by ambitiously applying innovation and significant resources to the largest of the world's problems." Sergey Brin & Larry Page

That is a pretty bold statement for a part of Google's business that doesn't really get a lot of press. It seems like most people know about Google, but really have no clue about Google.org. Basically, Google.org is a "for profit" business that has been designed to combat such things as climate change, energy, health care and global poverty. Right now, if you check out the site you can see a couple of the projects that they are working on. These projects include Acumen Fund which is designed to deliver affordable goods and services like water, health care and housing to poverty stricken regions. Google.org is even taking on such projects as creating a car that will get 100 miles to the gallon (boy I bet the oil companies won't like that!) Other projects include the PlanetReadproject andTechnoserve.

Dr. Larry Brilliant was appointed executive director of Google.org back in February. He is well known for his work in the successful WHO campaign to eradicate smallpox and has also worked for the UN in the fields of blindness and polio eradication. It certainly seems like he is the right person for the job with his extensive background. So what do you think of Google.org?

Google has released a new version of it's Google Groups application. They have updated groups to include features much like page creator. You can now create webpages inside of your group were you can add pictures, links and anything else you can imagine just like a website. The new beta version also allows the owner of the group to customize the colors and fonts of the group. You can even create welcome messages!

Members of the groups can create pages or you can choose to only allow managers to create pages. Once these pages are up anyone in the group can edit them, add to them or simply comment on these webpages. This makes it very easy for a group to collaborate on any one page and even saves multiple versions of the webpages just in case someone really screws it up! Members of the new beta Google Groups can now create user profiles that include a pic and a quote about yourself among other things. You can check out an example how Google Groups Beta work here. This particular group is called Photoholics Anonymous and really takes advantage of the new formats.

Google has released a special site in Google Checkout just for special holiday deals. It includes deals from places like Buy.com, Toys R Us, Zales, Areopostal and Starbucks. Google Checkout is also offering a special promotion of $10 off purchases of $30 or more before shipping and tax. You can check out the special site here. You can also view a demo of Google Checkout by watching the video below or read more about it here.

Google gave it's page creator program a much needed update recently. Page creator is a free service that Google offers to anyone with a gmail account. Users can create their own website using Page Creator with little or no knowledge of html. This was orginially one of my favorite programs, but I quickly saw it's limitations as the formatting and placement of pictures was very difficult to deal with. Google only gave you three sizes to choose from when placing a picture and this could lead to the sidebar not show up in the proper places when using Internet Explorer (not firefox for some reason.) Google has since updated the Page Creator program and now you can resize the picture to any size. You can also format the picture right on your screen including cropping, rotating, lighten and darken. Not only that, but they have given you the option to create up to 5 different urls. This means that you can register maludanplants.googlepages.com, plants.googlepages.com and maludan.googlepages.com. This is really amazing as each of these seperate domain come with a 100 megs of storage for your uploaded pictures. That means that Google is giving out a total of 500 megs for free to store your pictures... not to mention the 100 megs that they give you to use in web albums. Another upgrade is the ability to add "gadgets" to your site with just the click of a button. You can read more about Google Gadgets here. At long last Page Creator is ready to be easily used as a tool for any business to create a website. Google is pushing this very hard with it introduction of Google Apps for Your Domain, which is a service that allows companies to host their website and e-mail through Google for free. The web just got a little closer to meeting the needs of small business with this timely upgrade of Page Creator.

Google Checkout is a recent addition to Google's growing arsenal. It work a lot like Paypal as Google processes your online sales from customer's who use their credit cards including Mastercard, Visa, Discover and American Express. Checkout is a leap up on Paypal though as it streamlines the process into a matter of two clicks.

First an online store needs to put up buy now buttons on their site. These buy now buttons make it so a shopping cart is not even required. Checkout lets you design the buttons yourself by filling in your price, description, quantity and size. Then Google generates the html code for you and you simply cut and paste it into your site. Once the button is in place customers can click on the buy now button to purchase your product. Google saves all of your customer's credit card information so all they need to do is press the place your order button and your transaction is processed.

The business then needs to review, charge and ship the order which they do from the google checkout site. Once the Google Checkout order is charged the money from the sale is directly deposited into the bank account of your choice. Customer's can then review the merchant and give feedback on how well the transaction was process as in paypal with seller's ratings.

If you are still not converted from paypal you should consider these two extra bonuses. First all of there are no Google Checkout processing fees from now until Christmas! Also if you use Google Adwords already you are really in luck as for every dollar that you spend on Google Adwords you get $10 free processing from Google Checkout.

You can see a couple example of how Google Checkout is used at this website Easy To Grow Plants.

Co-Op is yet another platform that has been released to the public by Google. You may ask yourself "why in the world would I want to create a search engine?" Well, if you have more than one website or have an adsense account, the answer is quite simple. You see when you design the search engine, Google allows you to include any sites you would like in your custom search. For instance, if you have a blog all about global warming, you could have your custom search engine index websites like Greenpeace, The World Wildlife Federation, and The United States Environmental Protection Agency. If you have a site all about sports you could customize your search engine to search, ESPN, Sports Illustrated, NBA, NHL, and NFL sites. Now where the story really gets juicy is when you use Google Co-Op to help improve your adsense results. This can be accomplished by creating search engines that include all of your websites or blogs. Google gives you the option to search only the websites or blogs that you choose, or to set a priority on results from certain sites. This way when you someone types a search term into your Google search box, your website will be listed first in your custom search results. This allows you to keep users on your sites as long as possible, by sending them to other parts of your "network". You can also have other users on the web edit you custom search engine if you so choose. Google allows you to let anyone edit your search engine or you can invite people you trust to edit it. Google Co-op also allows the search to work on your myspace page as well, so you can finally start making money from your myspace page. So what are you waiting for get your customized search engine today, all you need is a Google account and you can start generating even more cash flow from the big Goog!

You can check out my Google Co-op search here. Feel free to sign up as a contributor and add your sites today!

Becoming a webmaster just got a little easy with the formal release of Webmaster Central by Google. Webmaster Central is a convenient way to submit your site to Google, and access webmaster tools that can be used to see how their "crawlers" view your site. These tools can also inform you if there are any errors or other "technical" difficulties crawling your site. Webmaster Central even has a site status wizard that allow you to simply enter your url (website address) and Google lets you know when your site was last crawled.

Check out these examples of simple webmaster tools to see how these "bots" crawl your sites, just type the following into a search.

site:________.com (simply fill in the blank with your sites address for example site:www.maludan.googlepages.com and see the results) This first one is to see if you are indexed at all in Google.

link:________.com is another one that you can type into a search. These results are what others pages link to your site.

related:_______.com shows what sites are related or similar to yours. I have not had to much luck with this one yet.

Be patient though, it does take a while sometimes to get indexed at all. Let me know what I am missing, or what you would like me to discuss in future postings.

Google has released the perfect storm of miniature programs for your website or blog. These Google Gadgets, as they are know can be easily add to your site through a simple cut and paste. As with Google Adsense they have written all the html code for you! Google Gadgets include 1,220 different programs that you can run on your site. This list is really amazing! It includes Wikipedia, Pacman, Netflix Quick Access, AOL Video, NASA Image of the Day, Magic 8 Ball, Stock Charts, Daily Trivia, Crosswords, Tetris, Moviefone, Local Radar, Daily Show Videos, Horoscopes, Jokes, The Periodic Table, Daily Nature Photos and even 100's of Bushisms. I found all of these in just the first few pages. Once you have found the right one for your site click the add to your webpage button and Google generates the HTML code for you. Most of these Google Gadgets can be customized for your site as well. They allow you to resize the gadget and add the border of your choice among other things. So go out and customize your website or blog with Google Gadgets. As with most other things Google it's all free!

For all of you out there that are addicted to the next blog button, but don't have the time to learn 15 different languages, you should check out Google Translate. It is an amazing tool that you can use to translate a piece of text or an entire webpage. All you have to do is type in the URL (web address) into the box that says "translate a web page:". Then you select what language the page is that you would like to translate, and which language would like to read the page in. Press the translate button and Google pops the page up all nice and formatted. Congratulations you can now understand all most anyone in the world! For instance, you can translate from Spanish to English, German to French, English to Italian and Portuguese to English. Remember this works for pieces of text too, so it could be useful in many other applications. For instance if you wanted to learn how to say "hello" and "goodbye" in Italian or "where is the bathroom" in French you can. So now every time you hit that next blog button and something catches your eye, you can use Google to find out what exactly they are really blogging about. You can also check out Google Languages to surf the net for page written in certain langauges or even in certain countries!

Google Groups can also be a promotional tool of sorts for your website/blog. You can either create your own individual Google group about the topic of your website, or you can search for existing groups with similar subjects. It can be a great way to "network" your website. Inside these groups you can post messages about whatever you like. Once these messages are up anyone in the world can comment on them. Most of these groups below are there for people to ask technical questions or get feedback on their site. Just make sure when you do post a message to include your url so people can easily click on your link. These are a couple groups I have found that you might find useful. The first is Blogger Review, this is a google group that is specifically design for getting feedback on your blog. For all of you Google Pagecreator fans, you can try Google Page Creator Discussion Group, this group is in place to help you with errors and get input on your creation. The final group I will give to you is Promoting Your Site, this is a group that was created by "Google-Power" very recently, and is designed to find the numerous ways to get your website or blog in front of people. If you have a tracking program like Google Analytics, you can see the traffic from Google Groups for yourself. Good luck building your "web" of contacts! Let me know if you found any other Google Groups that were useful to you, I know there are quite a few groups out there, it's just hard to find the great ones.

Google Picasa has become one of my favorite freeware product releases. It wasn't until recently though that I realized how easily Google's photo software could be used as a way to drive traffic to your site. The first step will need to do is take a few pictures of what your business or website is all about. For instance, if you are a fence company, you would want to take pictures of all the different types of fences that you install. If you run a florist shop you would take shots of all of your various plants and flowers. Next, simply select the pictures that you would like to make a movie/slideshow. Hold down the CTRL key to highlight multiple pictures. Once you have selected the pictures, go up to "create" in the menu and then to "movie". Now, you will select the second delay between the pictures. I personally like the full 5 seconds, but you decide. Then, you select your movies screen size. In this case the smaller the movie size, the smaller the file size, so keep this in mind. Next you select your compressor. I have been using Indeo, but you can choose. Remember, the more you compress the smaller the file size, but the lower the quality. Finally you just hit ok and wait for the movie to render. Congratulations, you just created your first movie for your business, or web site! Now you can upload this movie to Google Video and ad a link to your site, maybe some keywords and let the traffic flow.

Google released today a new version of Google news service. You will now be able to search through it's vast database of news articles from such publications as the New York Times, Forbes, The Financial Times, Time Magazine and Washington Post. Some of these articles date back as far as the 1700's! The articles will show a few lines of text and then you will have the option to be re-directed to the provider if you would like to view the entire article. (Much like Google's Book Search) The best part about this service is that it will show the articles in chronological order, so you can see how news stories were viewed throughout history. For instance, you could see how differently the media portrayed Iraq and Afghanistan in the past, and see how it evolved into the situation we are in right now. This is just another tool in Google's race to organize the world's information.

Google announced today the available of many out of copyright "classic books" for download. These writings include the works of Dickens, Shakespeare, Joyce, and Dante. With Google Book Search they are now just a click away, and best of all they are all free. Google has been working in partnership with the University of Michigan, Standford University, Oxford University and the New York Public library in this endeavor, which began in late 2004. Basically, they are scanning all of these books page by page to make the content searchable. Just imagine the possiblilites of being able to search thousands if not millions of books just by typing in a word or phrase! I have a feeling that kids these days will have a much easier time with books reports, to say the least. Many copyrighted books are also available to search, but Google only displays a small sample of text of these copyrighted books. Google just got one large step closer to organizing the world's information with this mind-blowing project. I know you all you bookworms will certainly love this one! What do you think of this project, and Google's stance on copyrighted materials?

Google today highlighted it's offering of a suite of personal productivity applications just for business called "Google Apps For Your Domain". Basically, what Google is doing is integrating it's e-mail, calendar, instant messages, web site creation (pagecreator) and Internet phone (google talk) into a bundle designed for specifically for small businesses. This will be a free service that Google offers to small businesses that sign up for the program. Each individual in the company will be able to have their own seperate account. Google is also expected to release a premium fee based service later on in the year for larger organizations. They had released a similar service just for it's e-mail service called "Gmail For Your Domain" back in February of this year. While Apps for your domain is impressive, the real story here will be when Google implements their Writely program and spreadsheet application in this "Google Apps".

Yesterday, Google released it's newly acquired program Writely to everyone in the world. Writely is a word processing program that was gobbled up by Google in March of this year. Writely is no Mircosoft Word though, it is a completly web-based program that allows users to store, compose, and even share their documents with others on the net if they so choose. This seems to be another push towards storing even more info online for Google. You can now access your documents from any computer in the word and edit in real-time. This would even work well in a business sense, as employees can colaborate on the same document from different parts of the world. Try it out, like most things from Google it's free so you have nothing to lose. Let me know what you think of Google's Writely below in comments.

Google anounced today that it has formed a strategic partnership with China.com. Google will help China.com by providing it with search engine technology. Google and China.com will also be sharing their branding and advertising power. This seems to be just another part of the big push into China for Google, and other Internet companies like Yahoo and Mircosoft. Many experts believe that the Internet advertising market in China is largely untapped. This could be a big win for both Google and China.com. What is your take?

Google again proved why it is the top Internet search provider. This time it was official from the American Customer Satisfaction Index (ACSI). Google continued to reign supreme as Yahoo dropped 4 points. The University of Michigan helped to conduct this annual survey by the ACSI. Google scored a 81 out of 100 while Yahoo scored a 76. MSN and AOL both scored a 74. This is the fifth year in a row that Google has lead all e-businesses in customer satisfaction. How would you rate them on a scale of 100?

Google today announced that it will offer a free printable coupon service for small business owner's. What do you think? Will this bring more local smaller companies to the net? They even offered this to business's that do not have a website, which could really drive up interest in this product. This service will be intergrated into the Google local maps listings. The listings will now show an icon for the coupons beside it. A business can even design it's own coupon through Google. Google could provide a much needed boost to many local economies. They also made a partnership with valpak, which mails a monthly envelope full of coupons to just about every residence in the USA. Could be a huge upside for both companies.

Google and MySpace together at last. What do you think is $900 million too much to pay for Myspace and the other News Corp sites. Personally, I think they well get a huge return on their investment with the booming popularity of MySpace. MySpace has now become the most popular site on the web, overtaking Yahoo just last month! Just imagine how many searches are made on MySpace in just one day. Not only that, but I am sure Google will make it easier to implement Google Adsense into the MySpace pages to generate revenue for the individual user. Yet another reason Google has such a bright future and is continuing to pull away from the rest of the pack. What do you think of this deal?

Now that we have discussed Adsense, lets flip the coin and take a look at the advertiser's side through Adwords, Google Analytics and Google Checkout. First of all, let me give you an overview of Google adwords. The easiest way is simply to see it in action with your own eyes. First, open up a google search and type in whatever you like, for instance "computers". Google automatically brings up pages sorted by relevancy in the middle, and the sponsored links on the right side of the screen. We are concentrating on the sponsored links as this is directly related to adwords. Here's how it works, a company that would sell "computers", bids on these keywords in order to have them show up on the right side of the search window. They would also probably have bids on such words as "hardware", "software", "monitors" and any other relevant term that they might sell. So here is the beauty of it, not only can you bid on these keywords, but you can also choose exactly what you are willing to spend on advertising per day, and where you want these ads to show up in different parts of the of your country or even the world. For instance, if you were a small business out of Detroit, your ad could only show up in Michigan, or even just around the Detroit area. Then, every time a potential customer clicks on your sponsored ad, you can track it through Google Analytics down to what city your potential customer clicked on, how long they spent on the site, and what depth they looked into your site. There are so many options that I have not even come close to mastering this "art". Google Analytics is a free service offered by Google. Just do a search for Google Analytics. After you sign up just add your website address, and Google will write a piece of html that you simply paste into your page at the bottom before the "body". Once this code is in check the status and you should be up and running. The rest is all taken care of by Google. They collect the stats from users that enter your site and put them in a variety of customizable reports. Trust me you will love Google Analytics! Feel free to ask questions or leave a comment below.

Adsense is still in it's infancy for me, but I can all ready see why it has become so wildly popular. Simply put, Google produces a piece of html (the guts that make your website work), that you paste directly into your webpage right where you would like the ads to appear. They give you several different formats to choose from, for instance vertical, horizontal or square. Google also gives you the option to choose text ads, image ads, local business ads, video ads, or any variation of the like. Then, once the adsense code is in your website, Google automatically scans the text on your site, and almost immediately you start seeing ads that are relevant to your site's content. So now for example, if your site is all about plants you will see ads for flowers, seeds, and the like. They even have an option to report if ads from your competitors are showing on your site. Not only is it a free sign-up for adsense, but they also offer two mediums in which you can use it in, as usual for free. One is blogger, and the other is Google Pages. All you need to do is create relevant content that attracts web traffic, and soon you will be throwing pennies in the jar at no cost to you except the time and inclination to create the quality sites. So, what are you waiting get started today? Or, whenever you feel like making some extra cash in your pocket. Leave me a comment below if you like....

Isn't it just amazing that traditional advertising still receives the kind of market share that it does. I mean how can a company even track how effective their advertising really is on mediums like TV and radio? Just because I see an ad for a Dell computer on the TV over and over and over again doesn't mean that I need a computer, does it? I suppose their plan is to pump it into your head until you eventually link computers with Dell instinctively, a lot like "brain washing". Nowadays, people are obviously very annoyed with TV and radio advertising, otherwise things like TiVo's, DVRs, Siri and XM wouldn't be so popular. Amazing that people will actually pay money to avoid having ads shoved in their faces. This is why there is such a giant push towards Internet advertising. People want, and need targeted advertising to help cut costs. If they are searching for a new computer it's because they want or need a new computer, not because Dell told them to go out and get it this second. Plus, the company can easily track this advertising directly through Google Analytics to the purchase in some cases. Instead of the traditional way of advertising, which is throw money at it and hope something sticks. Just wait until the local advertising really catches on the local web. Then we will really see just how big the market is for Internet advertising. It will essentially give more leverage to the little guy as it levels the playing field. Maybe someday when you search for computers in Detroit it will come up Discount Computer and not a big world wide corporate like Dell. I don't think this is very far off. How about you? Leave your comments below.

Just today Google updated two of it's most successful products Picasa and Analytics. Google's Picasa has been upgraded to make it easier for people share photos online with the push of a button. The newest version of Picasa has created a web album feature that you can share out to as many people as you want. All that you have to do is hit the web album button on bottom on the screan and start sharing. I think this could be one of the best features yet, as it will allow family and friends to share pictures from across the globe even easier.

Google Analytics also got an upgrade of sorts as the number of website profiles that a user can have jumped from 10 to 50. Another great leap for Analytics, making it even easier for the webmaster to tracking their traffic. Best of all, both of these products are still free, I wonder how long that will last?

This blog will be used to find different ways to use the power of Google. From Google Analytics, to Adwords to Google Adsense to Google Webstats to Google Pages Creator, to Google Gadgets, to Google Comment and whatever else is released to the public. Please comment on what aspects of Google YOU think we should discuss and we will publish articles regarding your questions.